Professor Mathias Senge

Chair of Organic Chemistry (Chemistry)

BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES INSTITUTE

Prof. Senge was born in Silbach, Germany in 1961. After service in the Air Force he studied chemistry in Freiburg, Amherst, Marburg, and Lincoln and graduated from the Philipps Universität Marburg in 1986. After a Ph.D. thesis in plant biochemistry with Prof. Horst Senger in Marburg (1989) and a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Kevin M. Smith at UC Davis, he moved to the Freie Universität Berlin and received his habilitation in Organic Chemistry in 1996. From 1996 on he was a Heisenberg fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin and UC Davis and held visiting professorships at Greifswald and Potsdam. In 2002 he was appointed Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Universität Potsdam and since 2005 holds the Chair of Organic Chemistry at Trinity College Dublin. He was the recipient of fellowships from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; recently he was named a Science Foundation Ireland Research Professor. His main interests are the chemistry and biochemistry of tetrapyrroles, photobiology, crystallography, and medicinal and bioorganic chemistry.

The main research area of my group is synthetic bioorganic chemistry and my interests focus primarily on problems of chemical biology that can be solved with a combination of modern organic synthesis and biological, and physicochemical methods. Special topics are: Bioorganic and biological chemistry; heterocyclic and natural product chemistry; development of new synthetic methods, bioinorganic chemistry; catecholase and cytochrome model reactions; regulation of enzymatic reactions on a molecular level; enantioselective catalysts; medicinal chemistry, esp. photodynamic cancer therapy, porphyrias, malaria, schizophrenia; photobiology; photosynthesis; structure and function relationship in biologically active molecules; structure determination and conformational analysis of natural products and coordination compounds. In addition we have smaller research projects in the area of novel photonics materials and enantioselective oxidation catalysts. The group has many national and international collaborations with groups from industry, medicine, physcial chemistry and structural science and is funded exclusively by external grants.